For all her rough and ready ways, she had something about her, said those she chatted with, that there was no resisting. She turned the heads of all the young fellows; it seemed as if they couldn't live without her.
The first winter a lad wooed her who had both house and warehouse of his own.
"If you come again in the summer time, and give me the right gold ring I will be wedded by, something may come of it," said she.
And, sure enough, in the summer time the lad was there again.
He had a lot of fish to fetch away, and she might have had a gold ring as heavy and as bonnie as heart could wish for.
"The ring I must have lies beneath the wreckage, in the iron chest, over at the island yonder," said she; "that is, if you love me enough to dare fetch it."
But then the lad grew pale.
He saw the sea-bore rise and fall out there like a white wall of foam on the bright warm summer day, and on the island sat the cormorants sleeping in the sunshine.
"Dearly do I love thee," said he, "but such a quest as that would mean my burial, not my bridal."
The same instant the thirteenth cormorant rose from his stone in the misty foam, and flew right over the island.